By John J. Joex
Sci fi fans often lament the many reboots and remakes of television shows that keep cycling through the networks and cable channels, claiming these as unabashed proof that the entertainment industry has fallen into a creative drought. Currently in the works, there are reboots of The Munsters (spearheaded by Pushing Daisies creator Bryan Fuller) and The Beauty and the Beast (The CW’s version is a remake of the 80’s TV series, the ABC version draws from the original tale). And over the past few years we have been subjected to failed reboots of shows like V, The Bionic Woman, The Night Stalker, and Knight Rider.
But reboots aren’t always a bad thing, just take a look at Battlestar: Galactica for indisputable proof. That 2003 series gave us a completely new spin on the campy, failed show from 1978 and delivered what has been heralded by many as one of the all-time best science fiction series. So reboots and remakes can breathe some new life into a concept that was poorly executed or failed to take flight upon its initial attempt. And a recent poster on the r/scifi Reddit pointed out a series that offers a perfect candidate for a modern day reboot: the 1973 Canadian-made series The Starlost.
For those unfamiliar with the property, it was conceived by genre-legend Harlan Ellison and gave us the tale of a multi-domed, generational starship that has lost its way in deep space. Each dome houses a separate society placed on the ship (known as The Ark) to escape from a doomed Earth. However, an accident killed off the crew and sealed off each dome from the other and centuries later these societies have forgotten that they are on a spaceship. But a small group of people from one of the domes discovers the truth about their home in space an also uncovers the fact that it is on a collision course with an approaching star. The series, which ran for sixteen episodes, starred Keir Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) and Star Trek’s Walter Koenig even showed up in a couple of episodes playing an alien known as Oro.
Ellison penned the original pilot for the series, but his story went through several rewrites and he quickly soured on the direction the series was taking. In fact, he ultimately disowned himself from the project and had his name replaced with his pseudonym Cordwainer Bird in the credits (a name he has used to indicate his distaste for a production he worked on). The show also had an inadequate budget to handle the required special effects (even though 2001’s Douglas Trumball worked on the series) and it was filmed on video tape giving it a similar look to the low-budget Doctor Who episodes of the day.
All of this aside, and despite some of the contrivances and leaps of logic in the story, there was a good idea at the core of Starlost’s premise. It just suffered from technology that was not quite up to speed with the show’s grand premise and from poor execution from studio execs who had little experience or patience with genre productions. But for this reason, The Starlost makes a perfect candidate for a reboot. A good idea (the excellent pilot script was novelized in 1975 and recently adapted to a comic book mini-series) that was poorly executed the first time around but that has achieved some notoriety. The technology today could easily supply the special effects needed to bring the concept to life, but it would not necessarily have to be a big-budget production because a lot of the action is “land-based”, either inside the ship or moving from dome to dome. This would be a reboot that would actually make some sense and could give us a good spaced-based (sort of, that is) science fiction series. I wonder if any of the networks or cable channels would consider it?
And there are several other genre shows from years past that would provide good candidates for a reboot as well. The Saturday morning series Land of the Lost is one I would love to see revisited. That series suffered from super-cheesy special effects (though it did have decent stop motion animation), bad acting, and at times infantile plots. But original showrunner and sci fi author David Gerrold (who penned the infamous Trek “Trouble with Tribbles” episode) worked hard to create an over-arching mythology for the show and he brought on several science fiction writers to contribute stories (including Larry Niven, Norman Spinrad, Ben Bova, and Gerrold himself). This series had a lot of strengths at its core and has lived on as a cult classic. An updated version that drew upon those strengths (and delivered a much less annoying Holly) could turn into a modern day winner (we will just ignore that the Land of the Lost movie with Will Ferrell ever happened, and that horrid 90’s version of the show as well).
Another potential candidate (and another former Saturday morning show) is 1976’s Ark II. That series about a group of people (and a talking monkey . . . no really) traveling around a post-apocalyptic Earth in the ultra-cool Ark II rover was actually not bad in its original incarnation. But it was mostly geared at kids, so it relied too heavily on nice, happy episode wrap-ups and never really delved into the potential moral ambiguities that would abound in an Earth where society had collapsed. A remake of this series could be produced relatively inexpensively, and could attract a decent audience if done right.
I could go on picking out past series ripe for a modern day remake, and may just revisit this in a future post. But the fact is that reboots and remakes (or continuations for that matter) are not necessarily anathema if done right. There were some really good ideas out there that didn’t quite fly the first time around but that could rise again through a remake done right.
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